Wednesday, 6 May 2015

Bellovian Soliloquys

T.S.
Eliot believed we irreligious moderns are “distracted from distraction by
distraction”—diverted from a life of dispassionate spiritual seeking by our
myriad amusements, our mass movements and mass media. Sixtyish Charlie Citrine,
historian and biographer, the narrator and protagonist of Humboldt’s Gift
by Saul Bellow, believes this also and hates it; but, unlike Eliot, he can’t
identify his dissent with a religious tradition rich in appeals to a higher
life. Left to thrash out some sense of things on his own, he cuts a comical
figure—anxiously talky, bumblingly earnest, infinitely pained by his private
impressions of the world, and torn by spiritual longings that must contend with
the mire of his personal life, the mess of modernity: divorce litigation,
love-affairs, bad business ventures, and intimations of mortality. The book,
despite its colourful characters (assorted lovers, lawyers and low-life), is
mostly Citrine talking to himself, in desperate soliloquy, allusive and erudite
and at times tiresome but more often effortlessly tossing off breath-taking
apercus. Citrine, like Bellow, seems to have read everything.

Bellow’s
novels are all strange sad comedies of self-consciousness, and constitute a
highly original fusion of wisdom writing and bumptious confession, with the
result that the awake, mindful, modern individual is rendered as a ridiculous,
poignant, needy but half-noble creature, driven by forces he doesn’t
understand, both inner and outer, but which he at least has the dignity to
question. Bald summation in limited space of all the themes Humboldt’s Gift
encompasses, all the questions it asks, is impossible and would diminish the
sustained, Shakespearean raging and fuming—all Citrine’s sound and fury, that
he wants so badly to signify something.